Fly in the Cathedral

Excerpt from The Fly in the Cathedral: How A Small Group of Cambridge Scientists Won The Race to Split the Atom by Brian Cathcart. Copyright 2005 by Brian Cathcart. To be published in January, 2005 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. Cavendish For many years Cambridge railway station was not to be found in Cambridge at all, but in the countryside a mile or so out of town. The maps show the line from London closing in on the city and then at the last moment veering eastwards as if repelled by invisible forces within. And repulsion by invisible forces was more or less what happened, for when the first railway was approaching in the 1840s the Cambridge colleges were so fearful of its influence that--in much the same spirit that they secured a ban on Sunday rail traffic--they contrived to locate the station at what one historian has called 'an inconvenient distance'. Several times in later years there were proposals for a more central terminus but they all came to nothing and eventually it was the town that moved, houses and businesses steadily creeping out along the road towards the station until the two were joined and the green fields pushed into the background. That inconvenient distance from the old town centre remains, however, and new arrivals at the station can still be dismayed to find their true destination some way off. At 8.50 p.m. on Monday 17 October 1927, Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton was just such an arrival. He was twenty-four years old, of medium height with a wiry build, a high forehead, heavy spectacles and a suit of clothes which, while perfectly respectable, bore no trace of style. He was tired, having taken the overnight ferry from Ireland and then changed trains twice as he worked his way across England. The carriages had been crowded and at each staging-post he had had to oversee the unloading and loading of a heavy trunk containing such items as his toolbox, his essential textbooks and, most precious of all, the draft of his M.Sc. thesis. Now he alighted amid the gloom and steam of Cambridge station and once again extracted his trunk from the baggage car. Depositing it in the left-luggage once, he made his way out through the arched portico and there discovered the quirk of his location: he had not quite arrived. It was too late, in any case, to try to make contact with anyone in the town so he found a hotel nearby and had an early night. After breakfast the next morning he set about his business. It was fortunate that he had an equable personality for another man in his position might have been anxious. There had been an unfortunate mix-up over his application to become a research student at the Cavendish Laboratory, with the result that while other successful applicants had arrived weeks earlier he had needed a last-minute scramble to secure his place. In fact there were grounds to suspect that the laboratory had accepted him only with reluctance, so a warm welcome was by no means assured. This was bad enough, but when Walton made it into town that morning a more pressing concern soon presented itself: time was ticking by but nowhere in the medieval maze of streets and passages could he find his destination and no passer-by whom he approached was able to guide him. 'Cambridge,' he wrote a couple of days later, 'is the hardest place I ever saw to rind your way through. I must have spent over half an hour looking for the Cavendish Laboratory, and I scarcely know the way to it yet, there are so many turns and streets to go through.' Free School Lane is little more than an alleyway at the back of one of the older colleges, but half-way along it a relieved Walton at last came across the tall, grey Victorian building he was looking for. There was nothing to announce its identity unless you counted a statue of the Duke of Devonshire (family name: Cavendish) and an inscription in Latin which, when translated, announceCathcart, Brian is the author of 'Fly in the Cathedral ', published 2005 under ISBN 9780374530266 and ISBN 0374530262.